Paul McCartney (44 page)

Gone was the happy atmosphere of all their previous recording sessions back to ‘Love Me Do’, which had always made itself felt in the music. George Martin was appalled by Yoko’s presence, and the interventions and distractions from her that repeatedly took John’s mind off the business at hand; though he was too much of a gentleman to say anything outright, the chill from the control room was palpable. Work periodically ground to a halt when someone went on holiday without forewarning the others–a sign of indifference of which even the usually punctilious Martin was guilty.

The only one to stay totally committed and focused was Paul, and what was seen as his schoolmasterly bossiness and badgering caused strife with George and John–or, rather, the two-headed entity John had become–that even their worst pressures on the road never could. We were all fed up of being sidemen for Paul’, John would later observe, though in fairness Paul was just as often a sideman for him.

The bad atmosphere finally even got to studio engineer Geoff Emerick, who’d been on every session since ‘Love Me Do’, and made many important contributions along the way. Unable to stand the three’s ‘arguing among themselves and swearing at each other’, Emerick quit in the middle of the sessions for Paul’s ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’.

The unravelling of the group mind was perhaps best illustrated by ‘Revolution 9’. This had started out as the finale to John’s ‘Revolution’, but had been extended by him and Yoko into a separate track heavy with the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Eight minutes long, it was a melange of random sound effects and squibbling tape-loops, punctuated by spoken interjections from John–and George–and Yoko’s voice repeating, for no discernible reason, ‘You become naked’. It was recorded while Paul was away in America, and finished by the time he returned.

His own appreciation of experimental music (and reverence for Stockhausen) far predated John’s; he had in fact instigated a not dissimilar piece during the ‘Penny Lane’ sessions two years earlier, which was premiered (on tape) at the Roundhouse under the title ‘Carnival of Light’. But until now, surrealistic sound effects had appeared on Beatles tracks only in tightly-controlled portions. Backed by Martin, he argued that putting ‘Revolution 9’ on the album was a piece of self-indulgence that would leave most listeners totally baffled. But John, backed by Yoko and George, insisted on its inclusion. The most avant-garde Beatle thus found himself cast as a play-safe reactionary, standing in the way of experimentation and adventure.

Ironically, the worst upset was precipitated by the band’s least demanding member: the drummer so resigned to his eternal back seat that he’d used the hours of Sgt. Pepper sessions not involving him to learn to play chess. Halfway through work on ‘Back in the USSR’, Ringo fluffed a tom-tom fill and received one of Paul’s little lectures, followed by a demonstration of how it really should be done. His response was to fling down his sticks and exit in an unprecedented huff, saying that his playing clearly was no longer good enough and he felt like the odd man out. (When he mentioned the latter to John and Paul in turn, each replied that he thought he was the odd man out.) The real reason, George Martin says, was that he couldn’t take any more bickering.

His defection–to Sardinia, to stay on his movie friend Peter Sellers’s yacht–was hardly catastrophic. Paul took over as drummer on ‘Back in the USSR’ and on John’s ‘Dear Prudence’. But it made his bandmates feel like warring parents who suddenly notice a child looking miserably down through the banisters. A contrite telegram from all three was immediately dispatched (‘You’re the best rock ‘n’ roll drummer in the world… we love you’), and when Ringo returned to Abbey Road, a couple of weeks later, he found welcome back posters all round the studio and his drum-kit covered in flowers.

If only the other problems ahead could have been resolved so simply.

Yoko’s affair with John transformed her from marginal eccentric to the most hated and reviled woman in Britain. The media portrayed her with one voice as a ruthless hustler who’d set out to snare a Beatle solely to use his wealth and fame to advance her own infinitely less worthwhile career. Enduring anger over Japan’s brutality to Allied prisoners in the Second World War–and enduring, unchecked racism–also came into play. Leaving his nice English wife and child for someone whom it was totally acceptable to call a ‘Jap’ seemed the ultimate example of Lennon waywardness, only now no longer amusing or endearing.

There was equal unanimity from John’s female fans, every one of whom had considered herself next in line should the day ever come when he was no longer with Cynthia. Wherever Yoko appeared publicly at his side, she was greeted with cries of ‘Jap!’, ‘Chink!’, ‘Yellow!’ and ‘River Kwai!’, jostled, kicked, spat at and yanked by the hair. One day, a group of girls offered her a bunch of yellow roses the wrong way round so that the thorns would tear her hands when she accepted them.

Whatever Paul’s reservations about Yoko, there was no question but that he’d be there for John amid these hurricanes of hate. The pair were living like fugitives–albeit with the cushion of John’s wealth and the Apple support system–crashing at friends’ flats, then moving on before the press could trace them. Paul offered sanctuary at Cavendish, where they stayed a month in company with his just-moved-in girlfriend, Francie Schwartz. Though few women got along with Yoko, fellow New Yorker Francie did; she would later fondly recall how John ‘liked his cornflakes’ and the three of them trying opium together.

John and Yoko were by no means the only negative Beatles headlines that summer. On 3 July, the Apple boutique in Baker Street closed down after barely six months’ trading. The garments made by its Dutch design group, The Fool, had proved too weird and far too expensive for its hoped-for mainstream clientele, while the fatal combination of semi-darkness and amateurish staff had created a shoplifters’ heaven. Not that Paul admitted any of that when questioned about the decision; it was simply, he said with Napoleonic loftiness, that ‘the Beatles are tired of being shopkeepers’.

The four and their inner circle had first pick of the remaining merchandise, then the doors were thrown open for the public to help themselves. Scenes of plunder and tug of war ensued that even Harrods’ New Year sale could not have matched. One middle-aged businessman was seen to emerge wearing a multicoloured jumpsuit so constricting that he could only hop.

On 17 July, John once again showed off Yoko–now no longer dressed in shapeless black but tailored white–at the London premiere of Yellow Submarine. That evening, very noticeably, Paul had no Jane doing her usual royal duty beside him.

Three days later, on the BBC’s Dee Time programme, she told host Simon Dee she was no longer engaged to Paul and that their five-year relationship was over. ‘I haven’t broken it off but it’s broken off, finished,’ she said. ‘I know it sounds corny, but we still see each other and love each other… but it hasn’t worked out. Perhaps we’ll be childhood sweethearts and meet again and get married when we’re about 70.’

Paul himself would only ever volunteer that he’d ‘got cold feet’–a normal enough thing for a young man of 26, even if the refrigeration process wasn’t quite as sudden as it appeared. Jane, on her side, refused all offers from Fleet Street to sell her story–and throughout her subsequent career as successful actress and author would maintain the same dignified silence.

In the press, there was regret that as one lead Beatle acquired a consort so grotesquely unsuitable, the other should part with one who’d seemed so eminently suitable. Even the female pickets who haunted Paul’s gate admitted how nice Jane had always been and how perfect he and she had looked together. But among the Apple Scruffs there was no hiding the jubilation: he was available again.

In reality, the break-up wasn’t quite as clean and civilised as it appeared. Not long after her Dee Time announcement, Jane paid a surprise return visit to Cavendish, evidently having been told that Paul now had Francie Schwartz living there and seeking to verify the story for herself. The girls at the front gate saw her coming and rang the entryphone to warn him, but he wouldn’t believe them and as a result he was caught in bed with Francie.

Later, too, there was an uncomfortable encounter with Jane’s mother–who’d once been nearly as much to him–when Margaret Asher arrived to take away her daughter’s remaining possessions. In the same spirit, Jane’s brother, Peter, to whom she’d always been specially close, might have been expected to resign, or be fired, from his job as Apple Records’ A&R head. But he and Paul managed to preserve their friendship and go on developing the label as fruitfully as ever. ‘I can’t remember ever waking up in the morning and thinking “Oh shit, I don’t want to go into work today,”’ Asher says.

Paul’s loyalty to John, though absolute, was far from unconditional. After six years of marriage, Cynthia Lennon had found herself expelled from his life with extraordinary cruelty and ruthlessness. Pending their divorce, she was still living at their Weybridge mansion, shunned by everyone in the Beatles’ circle she’d formerly considered her friends, like Pattie Harrison and Maureen Starkey. Only Paul, who had always liked and sympathised with Cynthia, refused to join in the boycott. Regardless of how John might react, he drove down to see her in Weybridge, presented her with a single red rose and joked, ‘Well, how about it, Cyn? Why don’t you and I get married now?’

The worst aspect of the affair for Paul was John’s abandonment of his five-year-old son, Julian, even though the trauma of being given away by his own father at the same age had never left him–and never would. The hurt was compounded by his easy acceptance of Yoko’s daughter, Kyoko, an unruly six-year-old, to whom she was given occasional access by her husband, Tony Cox. Then, to make Julian’s rejection complete, Yoko fell pregnant.

Paul had always been good with children and, over the years, had taken more interest in Julian–certainly played with him more often–than John ever had. During the boat trip around the Greek islands, John had watched the two of them have a riotous game of cowboys, then taken Paul aside and asked, ‘How do you do that?’

‘Paul was really close to Julian,’ Maggie McGivern recalls. ‘I’d seen them playing together for hours in the pool at John and Cynthia’s house. He thought it was really awful that John should be doing to his son just what his own dad had to him.’

On the drive down to see Cynthia, he’d begun writing a song for Julian, intended to be both a message of comfort and an exhortation not to give up hope. It began with the lightly-fictionalised title ‘Hey Jules’, but then metamorphosed into ‘Hey Jude’, an echo of Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel Jude the Obscure. As well as consoling advice to Julian, it was an oblique criticism of John that ended up lasting seven minutes; a prodigious length for a 1968 pop song. John, however, missed the point completely, seizing on the line ‘You have found her, now go and get her’ as support for his affair with Yoko.

Even here, the Lennon–McCartney symbiosis couldn’t stop working. One verse still lacked a final rhyme and Paul was singing nonsense words, ‘the movement you need is on your shoulder’, until he could think of proper ones. But John told him it was the best line in the song, so he left it as it was. In years to come, playing it alone to seas of rapturous faces, the memory of that moment would always bring a lump to his throat.

‘Hey Jude’ owed its first public performance to Paul’s parallel careers as Apple Records’ talent scout and producer and independent freelance composer (always thinking ahead to those ‘leather elbow’ years after he passed 30, when the Beatles were no more). Recently, he had somehow found time to write theme music for a Yorkshire Television sitcom called Thingumybob, starring the great character actor Stanley Holloway. His score was intended for a northern brass band such as he’d loved since boyhood, the kind traditionally formed by workers in collieries or factories.

To perform it–and also record it for Apple–he chose the century-old, multi-award-winning Black Dyke Mills Band, originating from John Foster and Son’s cloth mill in Queensbury, near Bradford. Seeking the most authentic sound possible, he recorded them in a church hall in Saltaire, near Shipley, making the 200-mile journey north by road with Peter Asher, Tony Bramwell, Derek Taylor, music journalist Alan Smith and Martha, the sheepdog.

The Black Dyke Mills Band instantly fell under the dual spell of McCartney charm and professionalism, and the taping of ‘Thingumybob’, plus an instrumental version of ‘Yellow Submarine’, went off without a hitch. But the spell-creating wasn’t over yet. On their return journey to London, the Apple party decided to stop for dinner in rural Bedfordshire and turned off the main road at a signpost to Harrold simply because they liked the name.

Harrold turned out to be an almost impossibly perfect village of thatched cottages and riotous gardens, bathed in evening sun. What happened there would be recalled by Derek Taylor in his 1974 memoir As Time Goes By, as if it had been a midsummer night’s acid trip:

We found ourselves in [the local dentist’s] house, below dipping oak beams, a banquet provided for us, hams and pies and salads, new bread and cakes, chicken and fruit and wine, and the dentist’s wife, a jolly lady, still young beyond her maddest fantasies, bringing out her finest fare. Paul McCartney was at her table in the village of Harrold.

Hiding at a turn on the crooked staircase stood a little girl, shy and disbelieving. But she had brought a right-handed guitar, and landed it in Paul’s (left-handed) hands, but the wizards were producing this play by now and floating with the splendour of this, the strangest Happening since Harrold was born, the dentist and his wife, and the neighbours as they crowded the windows and the parlour, and the children, all caught their breath as Paul began to play the song he’d written that week… which went ‘Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better…’

Afterwards, they all adjourned to the village pub, which had been kept open after hours in Paul’s honour. True son of Jim Mac that he was, he played the bar piano, sang and led community singing until 3 a.m.